So who is Thomas Jones?
Is he a failed first-round draft choice who mounted a classic salary drive in the last month of the last season of his contract with Tampa Bay?
Or is he still an inexperienced prospect who needs careful nurturing and coaching? Will he remain motivated after receiving his second huge signing bonus in four years?
Talk to the men who have coached him the last few years and a picture emerges of a player who wasn’t always used correctly, fought through illness and injuries, may have made a poor decision or two, but still can fill the Bears’ need for a featured back who can catch the ball and block.
“I’m a fan,” said Kirby Wilson, Tampa Bay’s running backs coach last season.
After three troubled years with Arizona, which made him the seventh pick of the 2000 draft, Jones was traded last summer to the Bucs, who needed insurance against the possible loss of Michael Pittman, who still is facing domestic-abuse charges.
“He came in with a cloud over his head, and whether it was right or wrong, I don’t know,” said Wilson, a running back at Illinois in the early 1980s who is now the Cardinals’ running backs coach.
“But from Day One, he said, `I’m going to work hard, be dependable and you’ll be able to trust me.’ And that’s what he did. I never had one problem out of Thomas Jones. He worked hard, had a very, very good attitude and accepted coaching.”
Of course, Jones had reason to work hard. In three seasons in Arizona, he gained a modest 1,264 yards, averaging 3.5 yards per carry. Despite his high draft status, he kept losing the starting job to Pittman and Marcel Shipp.
Then he missed the last five games of the 2002 season in Arizona with a broken hand. He looked Cardinals coach Dave McGinnis in the eye and said he did it slamming a telephone down, although a bartender later alleged Jones beat him up in a fight. Police declined to pursue charges.
Because he wasn’t injured playing football, the Cardinals had the right not to pay him for the final five games, and they didn’t. It cost Jones $144,000 out of a four-year deal worth $7.39 million.
“He got bent out of shape about that,” said Johnny Roland, the Cardinals’ running backs coach at the time who’s now with Green Bay. “And that was it.”
Next stop, Tampa Bay, and a fresh start.
“He was tired of being ridiculed as a bust,” Wilson said. “Confidence is a wonderful thing if you have it. He didn’t have any when he got [to Tampa Bay]. We had to build it up.”
Jones rushed for a career-high 627 yards last season. But in the final four games, he rushed for 364 yards, averaging 3.9 yards per carry.
“I don’t think that was a fluke, a flash in the pan,” Wilson said.
The Bears hope it was a sign of things to come. Four years ago, the Cardinals had their hopes up too.
Jones started the first day of his rookie season, which may have been the problem, Roland believes.
“We played him too soon,” Roland said. “He wasn’t ready for the pro game. He needed some seasoning. He needed more time to understand the concepts. And he worried about everything.”
Jones started only three more games as a rookie. In his second season, he started only twice. Then came 2002, when he missed some time with an ankle injury but started all nine games in which he played before breaking his hand.
“There were a number of things that went wrong for him,” McGinnis said. “He was always a very hard worker. He tried to make things happen too quickly. And he needed a better team around him too.”
Maybe the match never had a chance of working at all.
“It seemed like they drafted one player and played another system,” said Bears general manager Jerry Angelo, who was Tampa Bay’s personnel director when Arizona drafted Jones. “They picked him; he didn’t pick them.”
Jones said: “It wasn’t a good team; it wasn’t the right situation for me. I’m not sure how the organization felt about me when I came there, and the last couple of years they haven’t had that good of a record.”
Jones appealed to the Bears because they needed a running back who can give them more of a big-play threat and can stay in the game on third downs, which Anthony Thomas hasn’t been doing.
“People don’t realize he’s a physically tough [pass] protector,” Wilson said. “He won 85 percent of the blitz pickups last season. And in mini-camps through the end of the season, he dropped one pass.”
By the end of last season, Jones had become the Bucs’ starter and priced himself out of Tampa Bay. The 5-foot-10-inch, 220-pound running back will get a chance to prove he can be a durable, 20-carry-a-game runner in Chicago.
“He’s not going to get you three or four yards after contact, but he runs hard and makes people miss,” Wilson said. “He’s not an A-Train [Thomas] or Jerome Bettis type; he’s an elusive guy.
“If he stays hungry, stays focused, I think he can reach his goals, whatever they are.”
